Thursday, December 22, 2016

The Death of the American Dream for Some-But Not for Others

The American Dream is dying, but government
handouts for Amazon & Others Increase While it Steals from You!

President Obama was notorious
for distributing financial goodies, grants, tax breaks and so forth to his
supporters including such liberals as Al Gore, Steven Spielberg, Ronald
Perelman, George Kaiser, Elon Musk, George Soros, General Motors and plenty of
others have started businesses [many of which failed] at taxpayer expense…

Amazon too has grown at the expense of thousands of mom-and-pop
shops.Consumers may not realize it, but
we helped build the e-commerce giant by funding the state and local tax breaks
that have made the company so competitive.Amazon received $760 million in taxpayer assistance between 2005 and
2014, equal to 17% of the company’s global profits during that time.More than half the company’s fulfillment
centers were built with public subsidies.

Amazon has for years aggressively played local governments against one
another, striking deals to avoid sales and property taxes and using the
enticement of jobs as leverage.Some
communities have benefitted from an Amazon presence.But the tax giveaways have also undercut
local businesses, which don’t have the political clout to negotiate such
deals.Brick and mortar retailers
vacated 135 million square feet of space in 2015 alone equal to roughly 22,000
Main street shops!

Ninety-four percent of the 10 million net new jobs created between 2005
and 2015 were either temporary or contract-based, not traditional 9 to 5 positions
according to a study by Princeton and Harvard economists.

For most the American Dream really is dying.A study by economist Raj Chetty has
quantified what many Millennial have experience for years:It’s becoming increasingly difficult for
young people “to climb the economic ladder and achieve more than one’s parents
did.”People born in the 1940s, Chetty
found, had a 92 percent chance of earning more than their parents did at age
30.For people born in the 1980s, by
contrast, the chances were just 50-50.Why?Economic growth has slowed
from 4 and 5 percent in past decades to just 2 or 3 percent today, so there’s
less of the pie to go around-and fewer corporations offer decent benefits, such
as retirement and healthcare like those of their parents.More importantly, almost all of the benefits
of the growth that does occur are going to top earners, with people in the
lower income brackets stuck with stagnant wages.Americans in the bottom 50 percent make an
average of just $16,000 annually, while the top one percent make an average of
$1.3 million.And this inequality gap
keeps widening every year [despite Obama’s assurances that it isn’t].

The result:A society in which
most of the will stay poor, and rich stay rich…this lack of upward mobility has
not been seen since the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, the top-earning 400 US households reported 20 percent more
income on their tax returns in 2014 than in 2013 according to the IRS.The 400 paid 2.13 percent of all individual
income taxes that year, and required $128.8 million in gross income to make the
list.

On the other hand, roughly 6 million people with credit scores lower
than 620 are at least 90 days late on their last car payment, according to data
from the Federal Reserve.That’s the
highest delinquency rate for subprime auto loans since the 2008 financial
crisis.[According to a report in Time
Magazine last year, more people are ‘upside down’ in auto loans which have now
reached up to eight years in length in some areas]!

Disparity in salaries continues also…the average annual salary for a
first-year worker at a Silicon Valley tech firm is more than $105,000, plus a
nearly $13,000 stock bonus and almost $26,000 cash bonus.The national average salary is $48,098 [barely
enough to keep your head above water for a family of four in San Francisco]
according to the Social Security Administration.

Finally, as I predicted a few issues ago, expect the Fed to raise
interest rates soon [and they did soon after I wrote this] especially when [as
expected] President-elect Trump’s agenda of infrastructure improvement spending
and tax cuts brings strong economic growth-for the average consumer, it means
savers might finally start getting closer to a decent return on their bank
accounts.

Finally, according to the BEA's Journal of Economic Growth,
government regulations have cut your annual salary by $277,000 annually. If you
make $53,000 per year, you would be making $330,000 each year!

Two independent economists think those numbers are low. John
Dawson of Appalachian State University and John Seater of North Carolina State
constructed an index of federal regulations. They did this by tracking the
growth in the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations since 1949.
The number of pages in 1949 was 19,335 pages. In 2005, there were 134,261
pages. That's a six-fold increase. (By 2011, the number of pages had risen to
169,301 – almost a nine-fold increase.)

Dawson and Seater say that annual output in 2005 was 28%
lower than it would have been if regulations stayed at the 1949 level. And GDP
in 2011 would have been $53.9 trillion instead of the $15.1 we saw. That means
government regulations stole $38.8 trillion out of our economy in those 62
years. In 2011, that was enough to pay off the national debt
twice.

Post
Script

Attend
FreedomFest This Year

A dark
cloud is hanging over the lives of freedom lovers these days. It seems all the
news is bad. It’s hard to take. And the personal anxiety it causes, it’s just
too much. Every day we are being buffeted about bad ideas coming from the left,
from the right, and back again. And contest is dragging down the prospects for
freedom itself.

It is a crazy world out there with plenty of violence and everyone knows you
that under most circumstances, police usually arrive after the fact. Your
rights to defend yourself are often under attack, even for non-lethal
self-defense tools…Includes 2 books and 3 bonus CD ROMS

2 comments:

These stats are amazing to me-coupled with how low home ownership has become and how many are on welfare under Obama and it seems to me he's lost all bragging rights. How the hell has he retained such high approval ratings? I hope he enjoys his last taxpayer funded vacation that he doesn't deserve.